[A2k] Paris TACD Meeting: Draft 2 on RMI and TPMs

[Peter Eckersley]

On Sun, Jun 11, 2006 at 08:32:16AM -0400, James Love wrote:
> I have a general concern about RMI, outside of entertainment goods
> like music performances, movies and computer games.  It seems to me
> that the tracking of access to works, as well as copying and
> forwarding of works, presents one set of public policy/social issues
> in the area of entertainment goods, and other in the context of other
> literary works like fiction, memorandums about the Iraq war, EC/
> Pharma position statements on the medical R&D treaty, Pfizer's
> internal strategy memos, US State Department cables to Thailand,
> educational materials about HIV, and a million other areas where it
> is quite dangerous for society to introduce (as we are) technologies
> to track the movement of knowledge goods, not to mention the impact
> of such technologies on Berne/TRIPS three step tests in terms of
> pushing pay for use paradigms.
>
> Isn't this a big problem?   If we want to push one approach in music,
> do we end up with something that we don't want outside of music, that
> is far more important?  How can we express or deal with this issue?

I don't think the line between "entertainment" and "non entertainment" goods
is that clearly drawable.  A taste for radical political movies or music can
be telling.

If access to a work is going to be tracked, I believe it needs to be done in a
pseudonymous fashion.  That is, you can be certain that someone, perhaps
someone from a controlled sample population, accessed the work - but you can't
tell who it was.

Again, this is the same problem as voting: you want to be certain that the people
who voted for a candidate were on the electoral role, and you want to be
certain that nobody can find out who they were.

Cryptographers have developed some handy tools to achieve those sorts of
outcomes, but you want to be certain that they get used and used correctly.

--
Peter Eckersley
Department of Computer Science   &                  mailto:pde@cs.mu.oz.au
IP Research Institute of Australia             http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pde
The University of Melbourne